Forget Yourself Inside Me Like I Am a Vacuum and You Are the Sea
Rebecca Patek

Rebecca Patek
is a New York-based choreographer and performance artist who creates work that synthesizes dance, theater, and comedy. In New York, Patek’s work has been presented at Abrons Art Center, Dance Theater Workshop, 92nd Street Y, Movement Research at Judson Church, Brooklyn Arts Exchange, Dance New Amsterdam, the Joyce Soho, and Dixon Place. She has recently received commissions from the Museum of Arts and Design, the Chocolate Factory Theater, and Festival TBD: Emergency Glitter.

Forget Yourself Inside Me Like I Am a Vacuum and You Are the Sea

Um, so, what I’m doing with this tonight, um, what we're doing tonight is, um, this is, uh, like a simulation tonight, or like a model, like a microcosm, like a small … like a small version of what happens in the world. What we’re in is like, uh, is like an example or, like, uh, yeah, an example of, like, how things work. Like, it’s sort of like, uh, well, I've been thinking a lot, and you guys have also probably been thinking a lot, about the situation, um, like, the economic situation that we’re in. And how … and how things get from point to … like, how things get made, like, the process of manufacturing, like, the process of getting from point A to B. And, like, how different … you could take different paths … and you end up … you know … and, like, whatever pathway you go, you know, whether you turn left or you turn right when you get off the subway you’re still going to, like … you’re gonna end up here. Because this is what your destination was. And that’s where we are right now. And that’s what I'm trying to show you: like, how that happens.

By pressing play on the below videos you certify that you are 18 years or older or old enough for whatever country you're in to allow you to view sex, and that you are not nearby others who may be offended or are too young to see this, and that you won't assist such people in seeing this, and that you are not in the frame of mind to judge me too harshly for making this—because it could be offensive and/or boring and/or bad because it is wrong, or wrong because it is bad, either way just stay open-minded before, after, and during the videos and then don't think about this again for a week and then think about this and remember that I do not have a grant, no one really signed on to this, so I take full responsibility, but also you are clicking the link so this is in your hands now. I'm sorry.

Video production and editing by Jessica Lee. Second camera photography by Nick Miller.

Courtesy of Rebecca Patek.

You know Candace, right?Yeah.
Right? You know Candace? She’s the one who, like, referred … well … I feel like I should be totally transparent.Thanks.
I don’t—I’m not—I don’t totally … I mean, I might have booked her already. I don’t know how you feel about that.For this? For my role?
Yeah. But I mean, I don’t know, like, I don’t know what’s going on yet. I don’t know what I’m doing. I just wanted to, like, put that out there, for later. Like, is that OK?But do I still get the seven dollars?
Well … I mean … I just … well … yeah! I mean, for now. What I’m saying is, I don’t know where … like, I just—I don’t know, like, well, can you just, like, keep me posted about what you’re doing? You’re, like, on my radar. I’m glad we’re connected—like, now we know each other! I mean, would you be interested? Just so I can keep you in mind? Would you … be interested … in doing something with me, like, possibly, like, later on?Absolutely—oh. Oh. I want this. Yes. For sure.

“Forget Yourself Inside Me Like I Am a Vacuum and You Are the Sea” was published as part of Triple Canopy’s Internet as Material project area, which receives support from the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, the Brown Foundation, Inc., of Houston, the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, the Lambent Foundation Fund of Tides Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council, and the New York State Council on the Arts.

Triple Canopy is pleased to present Forget Yourself Inside Me Like I Am a Vacuum and You Are the Sea, a performance by Rebecca Patek. "She is in control; she knows when to fire," Gia Kourlas of the New York Timeswrites of Patek's signature faux-naif alter-ego, who skillfully mines and inverts the power dynamics of interviewer and interviewee, performer and audience, with precisely timed "ums" and "uhs." Patek also employs deadpan send-ups of the hackneyed language and tired postures of the artist's talk and artist's statement as she creates unsettling situations in which the language and actions of spectatorship, art-making, sexual violence, and interrogation assume one another's contours.

In Forget Yourself Inside Me, Patek addresses the notion of role-playing. Her performance will also act as a filming session for an upcoming video project to be published online. The spectators present will view a performance and serve as members of a live studio audience. To elicit the required material for her video project, Patek will play both performer and director.

Forget Yourself Inside Me is part of a new series commissioned by Triple Canopy featuring performance artists who use the body and its representation on video as sites both of extreme depersonalization and reclamation, objectification and empowerment. This series will be published—live, online, and in print—as part of an issue of Triple Canopy devoted to the profusion of digital and networked objects in the past half century and the ways in which our relationship to work and play, political and social life, memory and identity has changed as a result.

Participants

Rebecca Patek
is a New York-based choreographer and performance artist who creates work that synthesizes dance, theater, and comedy. In New York, Patek’s work has been presented at Abrons Art Center, Dance Theater Workshop, 92nd Street Y, Movement Research at Judson Church, Brooklyn Arts Exchange, Dance New Amsterdam, the Joyce Soho, and Dixon Place. She has recently received commissions from the Museum of Arts and Design, the Chocolate Factory Theater, and Festival TBD: Emergency Glitter.